


Infinity Questions

by KairosImprimatur



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Dragons, F/M, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 03:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KairosImprimatur/pseuds/KairosImprimatur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten days after the final battle in LA, allies gather to search for survivors and attempt to understand the events that led them there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Infinity Questions

Scenery changed, as it does, endlessly through the hours and hours of the ride. Connor couldn’t take his eyes away from the bus’s window, not because it was terribly beautiful scenery but because he had been subconsciously expecting it to become more and more ominous the closer he came to Los Angeles. True, there had been no reports of the physical damage extending beyond the limits of the city itself, but how was he supposed to know what he was looking for? This was his first Apocalypse.

Except it wasn’t, he corrected himself. Images sliced through his mind: a woman with a worm-eaten face, a horned creature they all called the Beast, a night that might have gone on forever. He considered the memories briefly and then ignored them. The knowledge he had from his other life might help him someday, but not like this.

For obvious reasons, there weren’t any buses running into LA itself, but he had found a route that went straight to the nearest disaster relief center. It wasn’t until they had crossed into Pasadena that the first sign of destruction appeared: the skyline was wrong. It wasn’t demolished, and he couldn’t have pinpointed which parts were missing, but it didn’t look right. For the first time, Connor felt his heart twist. It had all been so impersonal until now, so unreal. But he had watched the silhouette of that city approach him slowly when he was a little kid in the backseat of his family’s old Volvo, and ever since, it had always brought back that same feeling of wide-eyed excitement. Was the past he had known going to be taken from him along with his original history?

A collective murmur of dismay went up from the other passengers, who all seemed to notice the mangled skyline about half a minute after Connor had. He wasn’t sure if he had better eyesight than everyone else or if he had just been paying closer attention to their surroundings, but the latter explanation didn’t seem too likely. They were all going this way for the same reason, no doubt, and he didn’t presume himself to be the only one who was feeling uneasy about what he was going to find there.

The bus unloaded at a convention center, which wasn’t what Connor had anticipated any more than the sedate landscape of the journey had been. There were signs and Red Cross banners up everywhere, though, so he knew he was in the right place. With LA no longer in view, the other passengers loosened up a little and made themselves busy with luggage and chatter, and Connor shouldered his backpack and entered the building.

It might as well have been a convention, instead of actual disaster relief, by the looks of it and the activity going on within. Yet again, Connor had to ask himself what he had thought it was going to be like in here. The gory parts were over; the wounded had made their way to hospitals, and though bodies were still being recovered, the majority of them had been found and identified. Even the intensity of emotional reactions had died down: enough time had passed for everyone to go through panic and come out the other side. The atmosphere in this big, neutrally colored hall wasn’t a happy one, but nobody was screaming or even crying. At this point, they all just wanted some answers, and they were willing to stay calm and focused to get them.

It was harder than it looked. Connor found that out firsthand. He started at one of the information tables without a line, staffed by a pretty blonde woman in her twenties who smiled at him with understated sympathy. “You want to look up a survivor?” she asked.

He hesitated. There wasn’t an easy way to explain that the person he wanted to find was unlikely to be listed among survivors no matter what had happened to him. “A few,” he said.

She reached into a box under the table in front of her and pulled out a large binder, opening it to show him before handing it to him. “Everyone who checked in with us is listed alphabetically, last names first,” she said, “except for the most recent ones.” She pointed to two loose pieces of paper in the front, full of names listed randomly. “We’re doing our best to get them all into the database, but all we can do is print another copy every time the list is updated, and this is the latest version.”

Connor thanked her and turned to find a place to study the names, stopped only by her sudden question, “Is anyone looking for _you_?”

He looked back. She was holding out a clipboard with a pen, clearly indicating that he should sign in. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m not from around here.” Fortunately, that didn’t spark any questions about where he was from. He wasn’t sure he really knew.

The room had a handful of round tables encircled by folding chairs, all of them occupied by people poring over documentation or talking to each other. There was one table that seated just one person, a girl about his age, and Connor headed for it immediately, not only because she was a redhead but because it was good to see he wasn’t the only one who was taking this on by himself. She glanced up and nodded when he asked permission to join her, then went back to reading from the binder in front of her, identical to his.

Connor wasn’t a detective. When it came right down to it, his only real plan had been to get as close as possible to ground zero and see if any enlightenment came of it. White sheets of paper covered in an endless stream of unfamiliar names and phone numbers had not been what he expected. And he _really_ had to stop thinking that way. He sighed and searched his memory-- both of his memories-- for people who might be listed.

Wesley Wyndham-Pryce wasn’t there. Cordelia Chase...no. She had been dead before he was even reintroduced to his past with her and the others. He closed his eyes, reliving the sensation of her body moving beneath him, and tried to mourn. It didn’t work. It never did. He returned his attention to the list of survivors and flipped to ‘G’ for Charles Gunn. This could be a real lead if he could find him...but again, unlisted. He felt a triumphant prick of excitement when the last name ‘Burkle’ popped into his head, until he remembered that she was the one who had become the god-woman, Illyria. 

Connor skimmed the two pages of non-alphabetized names, and then, feeling stupid, checked under ‘A’. Nobody there with less than two names. He sat back and rubbed his temples.

After a few moments of idly scanning the room in search of inspiration for his next step, he redirected his gaze to the girl sitting across from him. She was still absorbed in her own search and hadn’t said anything, but she was easier on the eyes than anything else in the vicinity, and he was interested in her steely look of concentration as she ran her fingers down each column of names and then flipped the page. He wondered what her story could be. A sad one, probably, if she was here by herself. But then, the same could have been said of him, and he didn’t think he was such a sad story. Just a confusing one. 

He had watched her turn at least three pages before he realized what it was about the action that was really fascinating him. Her hand was gliding over the binder in a natural arc, but the paper wasn’t touching it. There was a thin line of space between the page and her fingers every time, noticeable only because of his angle and proximity, and as far as he knew, completely impossible. Baffled into silence, he stayed still and waited for the spectacle to repeat.

“This is bull,” she said suddenly, looking up without warning. She clearly wasn’t expecting him to already be staring at her-- why would she be?-- and the shock of being discovered so abruptly almost made him fall out of his chair. He smiled wanly as he righted himself, wondering if it was possible to get a miniature version of the spell that had changed everyone’s memories regarding his past. One that erased those last few seconds would do just fine.

However, she seemed to think that she was the one at fault, as evidenced by her slight blush and dropped eyes as she muttered, “Sorry.” Connor didn’t even have a chance to deflect the apology before she looked right back up and continued in her original indignant tone, “It is, though. I mean, what are you getting out of this? Anything?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “But I’m not really sure what I’m looking for.”

“My point exactly. Nobody is. So we’ve got lists of survivors-- great. Does anyone in this place have some real explanation on what actually happened? How much more vague can the news get? I mean, I don’t think they’ve even decided if they want to call it a natural disaster or an act of terrorism.”

Connor nodded slowly, re-evaluating the girl’s purpose here. If she was grieving for lost loved ones, she was certainly being stoic about it. “Natural disaster,” he replied. “At least, that’s where it’s leaning in the recent stories. I think they’d prefer terrorism, but they can’t find anyone to pin it on.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s progress. I guess. Maybe.”

He found himself grinning, not so much in pleasure or amusement as in defense against the absurdity of the situation. “No, you know what’s progress? Yesterday I read an article that used the word ‘dragon’ without putting it in quotation marks.”

That squeezed a grin out of her too, but she was clearly serious and wanted him to know it. “Read anything about Wolfram  & Hart? I mean, anything that makes the oh-so-radical connection between every branch in the world shutting down and LA going insane on the very same day?”

He gaped at her. Of course there was a connection; he might have known more about it than most, but any fool could make the logical leap. Nobody was talking about it, clearly not wanting to be the conspiracy theorists during these troubled times, and it was driving Connor crazy. But he hadn’t been speaking to this inexplicably talented stranger for five minutes and she was already dropping the former law firm into the conversation with casual ease. All he could think to say was, “You know about Wolfram & Hart?”

“Yeah, I was kind of a project there for a while.” She put a wry note to the words, but didn’t meet his eyes. “Got straightened out, though. What about you? Demon protégée? Teen avenger? Just politically well-informed?”

Connor restrained himself from answering too quickly. He didn’t actually know anything about her yet, he reminded himself, and there could still be supernatural dangers waiting for him. Hell, there could be anything waiting for him, damned if he knew. “Straightened out of what?” he asked. “I mean, just so we’re clear, you know they’re evil, right?”

“Yeah. Got that memo.” She paused, and they sized each other up for a moment. Her bright hair was the perfect frame for the bold look in her eyes; she seemed like someone who was habitually unafraid, not because she was innocent of the hardships in life but because she knew she could take care of herself. Finally she sighed and pointed to a pen she had left lying in the middle of the table.

As soon as Connor glanced that way, the pen jumped off of the surface, apparently of its own volition, and in the blink of an eye it flew into its owner’s hand. She let go of it again and let it hang in the air, between their bodies so that it wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else in the room. After completing a few gravity-defying spins and twirls, the pen hopped into her front pocket and was still. Connor had half expected her to finish the display by sending it into his open mouth.

“Looks like fun, right?” she said. “Thank the god of your choice you didn’t meet me when I had a little less control than this. Fun didn’t enter it. The lawyer people, they knew what I could do, but they thought they could make a tool out of me. Just something they do to people, I guess. But I got help from someone else, so...lawyer-free, here.”

Connor stared at her face, then at the pen in her pocket. Then he realized that that made him appear to be staring at her breasts, so he looked back up at her face. “I’m invulnerable,” he blurted. 

She propped her chin up on her hand and looked him over wordlessly, making it even harder to find the right words to complete the thought. “Not totally invulnerable,” he stammered, “but I was hit by this van, and I didn’t get hurt, and then later, well, I have super strength too. And my senses are better than, I mean, I don’t want to brag, it’s just...that twirly pen thing you just did! I have powers too!” He winced internally as his little monologue collapsed to a halt. She was going to think he was a supernatural poser. 

“How’s that working out for you?” she asked. 

“You believe me?”

She shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I?”

He could think of a lot of reasons she shouldn’t, but he wasn’t about to look this particular gift horse in its mouth. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Immediately?”

The question didn’t seem to surprise her, but she shook her head. “Not immediately, anyway. I’m not done here.” She gestured at the binder still open in front of her.

“Oh. Right.” He frowned. “Who are you looking for?” 

“I’m looking for the guy who helped me. You?”

Connor ran a hand through his hair, wondering how long it was going to take to answer that question, and also wondering if the guy who had helped her was going to beat him to buying her a cup of coffee. “I’m looking for my father,” he said finally. “Or one of them, anyway.”

There was no turning back after he had said that much. He started by giving her the bare bones of the story, but it seemed that every facet of his life required additional explanation before the whole of it could be understood. She asked the right questions to make it cohesive but said little else, and he managed to successfully wrestle his way through his first-ever experience with complete divulgence about his lineage.

“So you were there that day,” she said when he had reached a tentative stopping point. “You fought with him?”

“Just a little. He asked me to leave, and...” And he had left. There was nothing to add to that. “You think I should have stayed? I must sound like a complete pussy to you. I probably should have stayed.”

She giggled, a sound too childlike to be mocking. “Let go the conclusions, yeah? I don’t think you’re a pussy. I just wanted to know if you knew anything about this whole ultimate destruction battle day that you weren’t saying.”

“Oh.” He appreciated that she was trying to clear his conscience, but he couldn’t move on just yet. There had been too many days of retrospect, reviewing the choice he had made after hearing the doomed vampire’s plea. He wanted to try to justify it to her, just to have someone else who could judge him. “I couldn’t stay. If I did, I might have helped a little, but I couldn’t have saved his life and I couldn’t have saved my own. He knew it was the end. He _made_ the end. All those years he spent hiding who he was and what he was doing, and then one day, he just decides to put it all out in the open and fight the enemy right in the middle of the city-- that’s a kiss goodbye if I ever saw one.” Connor paused, suddenly aware that his voice had become rapid and grim. His audience of one was respectfully attentive, waiting. He continued: “By the time I saw him, everything was laid bare. He couldn’t have lied to me if he tried. There was only one thing he wanted, and that was for me to survive.

“So what was I going to do then? How do you tell yourself that picking up the heroism gig just in time to die for it is more important than giving a real hero his last wish?”

There was a silence. Connor didn’t know if he had justified the choice. The judge’s only real reaction was to meet his eyes solemnly and give a small nod. It was finally off his chest, though, and he was ready to let it release him when she said, “You really think he’s gone?”

“I don’t see any other possibility,” he replied, wishing the words wouldn’t sound as defeated as they felt.

She nodded again, then closed her binder decisively and stood up, pushing her chair out from the table. “Come on. You’ve got connections, let’s see if we can follow them to some real answers. There has to be some trace left of your superhero vampire dad.” 

Connor was taken aback, but he got to his feet, ready to follow. “I thought you wanted to find the guy who helped you.”

“I do. It’s the same guy.” Without giving him a chance to react, she shifted the binder to one arm and held out the other. “I’m Bethany.”

“Wow.” A smile rushed his face like a mugger, and he shook her hand. “Connor. Hi, Bethany.”

***

“Any luck?” asked the Red Cross volunteer who had asked Connor to check in. He and Bethany both handed their binders back to her, and she stashed them in the box for the next unlucky visitors who had loved ones to find.

“No,” said Connor. “But thank y—“

“Do you have any information about a vampire fighting a dragon?” interrupted Bethany. “Or, like, the demise of a demonic law firm?”

Connor and the blonde woman each turned a stare on her, probably displaying identical shades of disbelief, but, Connor thought, for very different reasons. His eyes darted between Bethany and the other as he tried to think of some excuse for his new friend sounding like a crazy person.

Before he could come up with anything, the blonde sighed deeply and crossed her arms. “You know about all that?”

Bethany shrugged. “Not as much as we want.”

To Connor’s continued incredulity, the volunteer tore a corner of paper from a notebook and began writing an address on it. “Look,” she said as she was doing it, “I can’t guarantee you that this place is safe. But this is where the underground has been gathering since it happened, as far as I know, and I don’t have anything else for you.” She straightened up and handed the paper to Bethany, though she continued to speak to both of them. “A lot of people saw the dragon and everyone knows something was going on with Wolfram & Hart, but if you heard about Angel, you’re in the select few. I don’t know what your connection is and I don’t want to. Just do what you have to do.”

Bethany shot Connor a smug grin as she glanced at the address and then put it in her pocket. “So you don’t know what happened to Angel?” she asked the volunteer.

She tilted her head, looking pensive, then said, “I know he wasn’t with the demonic law firm. Good luck.”

“Thank you,” said Connor. “A lot.”

Bethany echoed him and the woman waved off their gratitude. “Hey,” she said in sudden concern, “do you two have a place to stay? We set up a temporary teen shelter...”

“I’ve already got a motel room,” Bethany assured her.

“Me too,” Connor lied, settling his backpack onto his shoulders. He knew he could find a room by the time he needed one, and he didn’t want Bethany thinking he was trying to shack up with any teenage girls.

When the two of them got outside the conference center, they stopped and faced each other for a moment, neither fully sure of how to proceed. “So where is this place?” Connor asked.  
She pulled out the scrap of paper and studied it. “Just over the border of LA, it looks like.  
Probably right on the edge of where it starts getting blocked off.”

“You want to go?”

“We could split a taxi.”

Bethany was the one to find a payphone and call for a pick-up. Connor had never actually called a cab before, and hadn’t ridden in one since he was a child. It was a token of his double past, he reflected as they both got into the back seats, that even with everything that had happened lately, he could still notice how peculiar it felt to be riding around Pasadena in a taxi. He secretly wished that the driver would yammer at them in a Brooklyn accent, because that’s what they always did in the movies, but he was mostly quiet. 

When he pulled over to let them out, Connor’s first thought was that he had ignored their instructions and brought them to a completely random part of town, but after they had paid their fare and stepped out onto the curb, he finally saw a door bearing the digits they had specified. It was sunken beneath the tall nondescript buildings dominating that block, a plain black door at basement level with no sign or anything to distinguish it. “This is where the underground is converging?” he asked Bethany as the taxi departed. 

“Well, it is underground,” she pointed out. “Do you hear music?”

He did, and it was coming from behind the door. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but there was nowhere else to go now anyway. Bethany’s estimate about this area being on the brink of the no-access zone had been correct; from where they were standing they could see the sun sinking behind the twenty-foot wall of plywood and metal and plastic that had gone up around the heart of Los Angeles. It was hard to tell if the neighborhood on this side of it was still occupied, but the stillness around them suggested otherwise. There didn’t even seem to be enough parked cars.

Bethany descended the stairs to the musical door first, then looked up at him as he was following. “Should I knock? Probably not, huh?”

“They probably wouldn’t hear it anyway.” 

She nodded and tried the knob. Just before the door swung open in front of her, Connor saw her shoulders rise and fall, as if she was steadying herself for whatever they would find inside. He couldn’t blame her, but as it was the first sign of apprehension he had seen from her, he had to suppress an urge to say something comforting and macho. If she wanted emotional support, she would seek it.

The club-- it was definitely a club, they saw as soon as they entered-- was even louder than the sound from outside it had promised. As they stood blinking themselves into adjustment to the relative lack of light, it became evident that the music was live, and Connor soon located the singer on a small stage across the room from where they were standing. She was so obviously inhuman that for a moment he had trouble noticing anything else, but her voice was beautiful and there was something unexpectedly sincere about her mixed features and vibrant coloration.

“Isn’t this a Cat Stevens song?” murmured Bethany, close to his ear to make herself heard.

He wrenched his attention back from where it had been getting lost in the singer’s voice. “I think he did a cover of it,” he answered, dazed. He was finally beginning to look at everything between the door and the stage.

As humans, he and Bethany were in the minority. They might even be the only ones, Connor realized with a start: all of those people mingling with the demons could just as easily be vampires. Or something else. Was there anything else that looked human but wasn’t? He didn’t know for sure. His alternate-reality memories were packed with demons and monsters, but most of them were native to a dimension with different rules than this one. Holtz had educated him about the evils of this world, but now that he knew what the man’s motives had been, he couldn’t trust any part of that education.

All the same, he didn’t think they were in any immediate danger. Demons and humanoids alike were focused on their drinks and the music, and there were no storm warnings of violence. Apparently this was just a place that the hidden populace of LA was using to recover from the disruption of their lives and unlives. 

“Where do we start?” Bethany asked. Her eyes were moving back and forth across the room, taking in the eclectic crowd seated at the tables, the tealights filtering dimly through scattered clouds of smoke, the karaoke screen on the makeshift stage. She looked awed, and nervous, but far less afraid than Connor would have expected from a-- well, from anyone. 

He let the last notes of the female demon’s song play out before he replied, feeling the need to respect the music. Both he and Bethany joined the rest of the audience in a vigorous round of applause as the singer smiled and left the stage, and for a moment Connor almost forgot that they hadn’t come here for entertainment. Showing appreciation for a voice like that just felt so natural.

In the following interval he leaned over and said to Bethany, “I don’t know. We should probably find the owner of this place. Or just pick the friendliest face in here and strike up a conversation. Of course, I’m not really sure what passes here as a friendly-- hey, I know that guy.”

Sitting by himself at a shadowy table in the corner was a solemn demon in colors that were anything but solemn: green skin, red accents, purple suit. It appeared he had been absorbed in the music, but after following the singer with his eyes as she left the room, he sighed and leaned back into his chair. Connor was pointing him out to Bethany at the exact moment that he happened to look their way, and his brow creased suspiciously under his horns.

“Guess we start with him, then,” said Bethany. 

If it had been hard to find words when he first met the telekinetic, it was a hundred times harder to think of what to say to someone who had already featured in his past. Connor’s mind was a frantic mess during the time it took for them to cross the room. He tried to tell himself that however bad his history with this guy was, they didn’t actually have a history. It didn’t help too much.

When he reached the table, he coughed pointlessly and then looked into the expectant red eyes and said, “Lorne?”

“Blackbird has spoken,” said the demon. “Whatever it is that whoever it is told you I could do for you, they were sadly mistaken. Curb your disappointment and don’t tell anyone else where I am.”

Connor exchanged glances with Bethany before trying again. “Nobody sent me. We know each other-- I’m Connor Reilly? You worked for Wolfram & Hart, and I was kind of a client there?” 

“Not exactly the key to my heart, sweetcheeks, but now that you mention it your face does have that certain glow of familiarity. So you’re looking for legal help? Allow me to inform you that this is the wrong place. Actually, this is probably the wrong place no matter what you’re looking for, including good company, a decent Sea Breeze, and two tolerable performances in a row.” He winced at the stage as a hairy and fat demon clambered up and grabbed the microphone. “Point in case. And you two aren’t quite blending.”

Bethany blushed and glanced furtively around the room at that, but Connor simply decided it was time to get serious. Quickly he pulled out a chair for Bethany and then one for himself, and sat down in front of Lorne with his arms crossed on the table. “I know you can help us. I know what you can do. We just want to find out what happened to Angel, and then we’ll leave you—“

“Whoooa! Red light! I’m not looking for Angel, Angel isn’t looking for me, and what I can do has no relevance to this situation. Can we just drop the subject and listen quietly to Olfer the Malevolent slaughtering an innocent Beach Boys tune?”

“ _No._ ” Connor said the word with such emphasis that Bethany leaned in with a worried look on her face.

“Connor,” she started, but he took a deep breath and tried speaking again in a calmer tone. It was actually kind of nice that she was concerned about keeping the peace, but he wasn’t going to let Lorne just shoot him down like this.

“Look,” he said. “If I sing, will you read me and tell me what you can? I won’t ask for anything else.”

Bethany raised an eyebrow at both of them. “If you _sing_?”

“He’s an empath,” Connor explained. “When people sing he reads their auras. Or futures, or something. Anyway, he can get something out of me.”

Lorne sighed and took a sip of his drink, giving it a look of distaste as he set it down. “I’m not a destiny vending machine,” he complained. “Even if I do hear you out for a song, there’s no reason it should give me anything about Tall Dark and Tragic.”

“I think it will,” said Connor. “I mean, I’m his son, that’s got to count for something.”

For a few seconds there was just an uncomfortable silence, and then Lorne said, “Someone really should have taught you the facts of unlife, my lamb. You see, when a mommy vampire and a daddy vampire love each other very much, nothing happens. Your delusions, while charming, require a specialist in a field other than mine.”

Connor’s frustrations were mounting. He had thought that someone would have given Lorne some kind of explanation of the reality shift. Or at least an outline of it. “Can I just sing?” he repeated. “Then you’ll at least know if I’m telling the truth, right?” 

“You don’t need my permission for that,” said Lorne. “Not my club. If it were, you’d notice a few major differences in sight, smell, taste, and touch.”

Bethany giggled. “Not sound?”

“Unfortunately, cupcake, wherever you leave an open mike, you’re going to attract a few Olfers. It’s the price of freedom.” He looked at Connor. “If you sing, you’d better understand you’re getting in line and singing for everyone. It’s beyond tacky to interrupt while someone else is on the stage.”

“I’ll go get the song list!” said Bethany. She was gone from the table before Connor could reply, leaving him to wonder what had her so enthused.

“So who’s your friend?” asked Lorne. “Offspring of a ghost? Renegade goddess, maybe?”

“Uh, no. Not that I’m aware of. She’s a-- we just met today. But she knew Angel too.”

The demon nodded and then went silent, keeping his eyes locked on Connor in a vaguely unsettling manner. “Are you reading me already?” Connor finally asked. “I thought it didn’t work without singing.”

“Can’t get anything substantial, but you’ve got one doozy of an aura. It’s kind of checkered.”

Connor had a moment of doubt about Lorne as a source of information-- it was, after all, possible that he was willing to make things up for his own reasons. Bethany’s return put a stopper on the pursuit of any such suspicions, which Connor had to admit was probably a good thing. As she slid back into her seat and set down a large book listing the karaoke selections, Connor heard Lorne murmur, “Or maybe plaid...” He did his best to ignore it.

“So what are your favorite bands?” asked Bethany. “Let’s see if they’re in here.”

“Amon Tobin doesn’t have words. Massive Attack...is not going to be in there. Looking for my favorites in a karaoke bar is probably a lost cause. I just have to think outside my box.” Suddenly recognizing a chance to win some points with her, he added, “Who’s your favorite?”

She shrugged. “I like a lot of different stuff. Never heard of yours, though. What do you think of Gorillaz?”

“Marketing ploy,” he answered immediately, flipping past pages and pages of terrible pop songs. “Damn good one, though.” He looked up just in time to see her satisfied smile: right answer.

“They have Barenaked Ladies,” she noted, pointing. “I bet they’d be easy.”

“Obviously we’re not thinking about the same Barenaked Ladies...”

Lorne looked pained. “So that’s a random sampling of the music you kids are listening to? Not healthy, I say. You need some Jackson Five in your diet.”

Connor disregarded him; Bethany could plead their case if she wanted to. Drawing inspiration from the comment she had made when they entered the club, he flipped back towards the beginning of the book. He had some good memories of his father playing Cat Stevens on his guitar for family sing-alongs.

And sure enough, there was his song, too appropriate to avoid even if it made Connor want to sigh: “Father and Son.”

Bethany informed him that there wasn’t anyone else in line, so as soon as Olfer the Malevolent left the stage (to the sound of relieved applause), Connor was up. The stage only put him about a foot higher than the rest of the room, but it still felt like he was looking down into a pit full of savage monsters. He gave them a little wave, wondering if he should introduce himself, but then the music started. He was almost thankful for it.

Singing wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t as if he’d never done it before. He’d even been told he had a good voice. But a few lines in, Connor started thinking about the song he had chosen a little too hard. He couldn't to relate to the first part, which referenced his own old age and cautioned against rash action. In fact, Connor could readily imagine the lyrics being spoken by either his father or Angel, and it kind of ticked him off.

Where had that damned vampire _gone_? What right did he have to take on the world by himself and refuse help from his own...whatever Connor was? Los Angeles had been trashed, and Connor had been sent back to Stanford like a child. _“You will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.”_

Yeah, right. He reached the chorus and surprised himself by tearing into it with more passion than he’d realized he had in him. The crowd, subdued as they were, showed some reaction, causing him to remember to look over at his table. Bethany looked impressed. Lorne looked completely dumbfounded, which gave Connor some peevish inner validation. That would show him.

The day after he had gone to Wolfram  & Hart with his parents and had his original memory restored, Connor had shut himself into his room and let his weak knees give out. For hours he had lay huddled on the floor, eyes open and unseeing, and worked his brain as he never had before, trying desperately to recreate the person he had always thought he was. The only thing that had brought him to equilibrium was realizing that his two lives were not equally formative; only one had contributed to his present-day self. Only one was really him.

As much as that simplified things, it was no easy burden to know what could have been, and to see firsthand how Angel considered him. It would have been helpful to just talk to someone about it, but Connor had to keep the secret: his family could only be hurt by it, and anyone else would never believe. And Angel himself...making the choice had been hard enough on him. The only way Connor could make it any easier was by pretending everything was fine.

_“...Keeping all the things I knew inside, it’s hard, but it’s harder to ignore it.”_ The song was drawing to a close and Connor was starting to feel faintly embarrassed about the way he had been belting it out like a rock star, but he got to the end of the final chorus before setting down the microphone and making a swift exit from the stage. Applause was following him, he realized, not as loud as it had been for the brightly-colored female singer, but still fairly enthusiastic. It was a good thing none of his college friends were here. They never would have let him live this down.

Bethany was smiling as he took his seat next to her at the table. “He believes you now,” she said, gesturing at Lorne.

“Wish I didn’t,” the demon agreed. “Takes a moment like this to make you start wondering how many of your friends have tampered with your mind. Do me a favor, my little walking contradiction, and refrain from doing anything else interesting for a while.”

Connor, feeling inexplicably chagrined, nodded and wondered how long he should wait before picking up where he had left off in pressuring Lorne for information. “It wasn’t exactly tampering with your mind,” he offered. “It was a reality shift. Everything changed at once.”

“Indeed it did, and it never changed back, did it?” Lorne’s voice was low and shrewd, and his eyes gleamed with a scarlet intensity that was easy to miss when viewed as part of his clashing ensemble. “Let me cut this deck, now. I mean you no harm, but what I just picked up from you is your memories, not mine. You’re not my little adopted nephew, and you’re not the psychopathic demon-killer from another dimension. I’ve got the facts about you, sure, but that’s the only thing we share, so we’re starting from scratch here.”

“Cold,” observed Bethany.

Connor shook his head. “No, he’s right. It’s the same for me. I’ve got the memories, the skills I learned, but there’s no emotion attached to them. I remember you,” he said to Lorne, “but this isn’t a reunion. Right?”

The demon nodded and opened his mouth to reply, but Bethany interrupted. “Which life taught you to sing? ‘Cause that didn’t sound emotionless to me.”

Her reasoning dug a much-needed laugh out of Connor, though he had never formally learned to sing in either life and thus had no answer for her. To his surprise, Lorne was smiling too, and even raised his eyebrows as he raised his glass, in a way that suggested agreement with Bethany. All he said, though, was, “Right you are. Welcome to Square One.” 

“Cool.” Connor hesitated, wishing he had a drink of his own. Having something to occupy your mouth always made the hesitations easier. “You mind if I ask you something?”

“Not terribly, but thanks for the greatly belated thought.”

“Why aren’t you and Angel looking for each other? I thought you were friends.”

He wasn’t blind to the sensitivity of a question like that, but Lorne’s reaction wasn’t exactly offended. If anything, his silence seemed full of fathomless sadness. “We were,” he said finally. “But you came here to find out about the end, didn’t you?”

The word end resonated in Connor’s ears, and his heart sank. No wonder Lorne was being so reluctant. He had bad news, and he was weary of being the bearer of such. Even while trying to begin processing the reality of Angel’s death, Connor’s conscious mind found room to feel sorry for the empath. “I just want to know what happened to him,” he said, studiously refusing to look at Bethany until his voice stopped sounding quite so weak. “He was my father.”

“Would you swear to that in a court of law?”

“He’s one of my fathers. You know all this.”

Lorne tilted his head, birdlike. “The one without the emotions attached, supposedly, yet here you are. Miles from home, grasping at straws, and until quite recently, all alone. You’re not doing this because of lineage.”

“What about me?” Bethany cut in. “I’m here because he did me a good turn. Not everything is about lineage.” Only Connor’s enhanced senses allowed him to hear what she added under her breath: “Thank God.”

Lorne looked at Connor. “You second that, dumpling?”

It was the first time he had needed to think about it in those terms, so he rolled it over in his mind before answering. They had a point, though Connor couldn’t quite find the importance of it. “Sure. I mean, I have a dad already. And even if I could still feel the way I felt in the old memories, Angel and I had a pretty messed up relationship. But now I know what kind of sacrifices he made, and it’s, you know, it’s not fair. I thought maybe if I found him, he would need some help and I could help him, and then we could kind of be a team. Not a family, a team. But I guess now I just want to know what I should have done differently to get here in time.” He dropped his head into his hands and scrubbed them through his hair. “I _suck_ at saving people. Who the hell rides a bus to the rescue?”

“Depends on the rescue, sugarplum,” said the demon sympathetically. “But in Angel’s case I don’t believe any public transportation was involved. Possibly an airplane. Details are fuzzy, but I’m sure it was a top-class rescue.”

Connor lifted his head slowly to find Lorne’s gaze. Bethany, who had been slouching over the table with downcast eyes, did the same. “What are you saying?” Connor asked. “He was rescued? Well why didn’t you say so sooner? Is he alright? Where is he?”

Lorne shrugged, holding out both hands to dramatize the gesture. “This is only what I’m lifting off your merry tune. And let me tell you, that was a few Brittanica volumes worth of information, so don’t expect to have it all interpreted and recited back to you. But I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true: the big guy’s alive. Anything beyond that, you won’t be hearing from me.”

“Anything?” Bethany’s voice was brittle with disbelief. “So he could be bleeding in an alley somewhere?” 

“He could, except that would really defeat the whole purpose of a rescue, wouldn’t it?” Lorne sighed. “I don’t know what’s in the cards for Angel. It certainly appears that he’ll have help, but you won’t be the ones bringing it. Sleep soundly knowing he’s still around for the occasional act of heroism, and let him alone.”

Connor’s memory involuntarily flew back over his last few minutes with Angel. “Let him alone?” he said. “Don’t you think he’d want to see me? To know I was okay?”

“Are you?”

Connor narrowed his eyes, but Lorne looked guileless, sincere. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he repeated. “The last Angel knew, you were getting yourself away from danger and living the normal life he wanted for you. Now you’re in a demon club-- one without any protective forces on it, I might add-- and you’re asking me for directions on where to get yourself into more trouble. Believe me, if Angel wants to check up on you, he’ll do it. And you’ll probably never know he was there, but where’s the harm in that? You know he’s got your back. Listen to me, o little plaid prince, you can either have a working relationship with your long-lost daddy, or you can live a good long life for his sake, but you can’t do both. He knows that. He made his choice.”

It was no less than the explanation that Connor had previously given to Bethany about why he had left Los Angeles before the battle, and he could see from her face that she was thinking the same thing. It wasn’t enough this time, though. True, he had told himself that all he wanted was to affirm Angel’s survival, or learn the story behind his death, but now he was forced to admit that he had paid for his bus ticket expecting it to buy a handshake or hug. Lorne couldn’t offer him that, and he couldn’t kill the guilt, either.

“Because he’ll never have a good normal life, right?” Connor said at length. “He’ll always keep fighting.”

“As long as he has the strength.”

Connor paused again, not really wanting to pursue this train of thought but seeing no other option. “I have the strength,” he said. “I have superpowers. “

“I can get cats out of trees,” said Bethany. “It always makes them mad, though.” It took a moment for Connor to understand she was being wry. Her sense of humor took a little getting used to.

Lorne took it in stride. “I’m sure the cats are thanking you, deep in their fuzzy little hearts.”

“Right,” said Connor, trying to get back on track. “So what right do we have to let someone else do all the fighting while we live like average humans?”

Bethany’s eyes widened. “With great power comes great responsibility!” she said suddenly, then looked sheepish. “Sorry. I didn’t mean...you just made me think...”

“Spider-man,” Connor finished, and they shared a grin.

Nobody had taken the stage directly after Connor’s turn, and the music playing in the meantime had been a bland local radio station. Now it stopped, and another singer picked up the microphone, a demon with only a few subtle differences from the appearance of a human. The change in atmosphere as he started on a slow ballad was enough to make the conversation at the table take a break, all three of them gazing ponderously at the stage.

Lorne was the first to speak, though he gave no indication of whether he was talking to Connor, Bethany, or neither. “Spider-man would have probably found a few kindred spirits in that last battle. Sometimes it seemed like they stopped even wondering what normal lives would be like.” He leaned back and stretched out his legs under the table, but his eyes flicked over to Connor. “I’ve known a lot of heroes, your father not last among them. And I’ve had the mixed blessing of hearing some of them sing. Without that, it’s hard to tell who’s got the great power, and out of those, who sees the great responsibility. Some of them are centuries old with super strength and a bleeding conscience, sure, but then there’s the skinny girl with a knack for science and a history of mental instability. Or the kid from the ghetto with a homemade battleaxe. Funny thing, though: no matter how different they all were, no matter what kind of background they started out with, they all had this one thing in common-- not a one of them took up the gauntlet until they realized there was something in this world worth saving.”

The nameless heroes of Lorne’s speech were recalled with such compassion that it was difficult for Connor to get beneath it and find the point he was seeking. “You don’t think I realize that,” he accused. “You don’t think I care about the world I’m living in.” He could have gone on, but he didn’t want to get any more angry than he was. If something happened to his family or friends he would go through hell and back to save them, and it made him ill to think that Lorne, empath that he was, could read him and still not know that.

“I think you care, kid. I don’t think you _know._ ” The demon exhaled slowly. “Not my place to say, but unsolicited advice is a way of life for the born chatterbox, so here it is: give yourself a few years. Get acquainted with the world and see if it wants you to be its savior.”

Connor clenched his teeth and stared at the tabletop, unable to snap out of it even when the singer finished his song and left the stage, applause rising from every other part of the club. A paper napkin brushed against his hand and landed silently before his eyes. Scrawled in ballpoint pen across it were the words, _He’s cool but he’s kind of confusing, isn’t he?_

Bethany was smiling at him when he looked up at her, and he closed his hand over the napkin and smiled back with a slight nod. “I should go,” he said, just loudly enough to be heard by both her and Lorne. “It’s been a long day. Unless you’ve got anything else to tell us, Lorne. Any facts, I mean.”

“Everyone wants the facts,” said Lorne. “Nobody wants the opinions of the guy who knows the facts.” He paused, then saw Connor’s and Bethany’s waiting looks and concluded, “No, I don’t have anything else to tell you.”

“I better go too,” said Bethany, starting to rise. “Taxi again?”

Connor reached under the table for his backpack and then stood up. “Sure.” He turned to Lorne, knowing they probably wouldn’t meet again and unsure of how to feel about it. “Thank you. Really.”

“Don’t mention it. Have a swell night, Junior Mints.” After he had bid goodbye to Bethany, showing her a little extra warmth that Connor couldn’t begrudge her, Lorne was silent until the two of them were starting to walk away. Then he said, in a tone that suggested loads of mental hesitation, “One more thing.”

They both turned to listen, and he raised one hand slightly off the table to gesture at them. “You two should stick together.”

Bethany looked up into Connor’s eyes, then back at Lorne. “Thanks,” she said.

***

Connor fell asleep in the double bed of his budget motel room and dreamed of his childhood. He was in the backseat of the old Volvo, but instead of his father in the driver’s seat it was Angel, and though the face of the woman riding shotgun was hidden from view, he knew with the certainty of dream-logic that it was Darla. Connor kept asking if they were there yet, to which she would answer, “No, dear,” while Angel sang Cat Stevens, loudly and off-key. When Connor spotted a Dairy Queen, Angel pulled up to it and bought them each a blood-flavored ice cream cone. Bethany was attending the drive-through window, and she leaned out as she handed the cones to Angel, fluttering her lashes and thanking him profusely for saving her.

The high-pitched beep of the alarm on Connor’s digital watch was almost a relief, but by the time he found it on the bedside table and got it to turn off, he was thoroughly annoyed and as awake as he was going to get. He sat up and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Okay, everyone,” he said out loud to the empty room. “Eardrums, stop ringing. Subconscious mind, stop tripping me out. Hormones, stop thinking about Bethany. Got it? Got it.”

His hormones obeyed, albeit sluggishly, but he and Bethany had agreed to meet at ten o’clock at the Starbucks around the corner, so he couldn’t stop thinking about her entirely. Besides, it was too early to try to deconstruct Lorne’s words, and it wasn’t as if Angel was there to offer any food for thought.

He deliberately got to the coffee shop before ten so that he would be there before she was. They were staying at the same motel, but she didn’t know it, as he had managed to suavely see her to her door and then depart without mentioning that he was just going back to the front desk to get a room for himself.

It took about ten minutes after Connor had purchased his first cappuccino for Bethany to enter and glance around the room for him. He hailed her from his table and then hurried over to meet her at the counter before she could order. “Hi. Pick your caffeine, I’ve got it.”

The corner of her mouth twitched into a smile. “Vanilla mocha latte,” she said to the barista, and then to Connor, “But I can pay for it myself.”

He affected a hurt expression. “I’ve been waiting to buy you coffee since yesterday. Don’t take this away from me.” She acquiesced without further resistance, and he ordered a replacement for his finished cappuccino.

They chose a table conveniently located some distance from any other customers, but it took a while for any private subjects to come up anyway. It hadn’t been hard for them to agree to get together again today, not because of Lorne’s parting words but because there was so much they both needed to talk about and nobody around to listen but each other. Connor had been a little nervous that one of them was going to start getting overly emotional about something-- Angel, or the ruin of LA, or the burden of having abilities that needed to be kept secret-- but, on the contrary, they both seemed to forget every meaningful topic as soon as they sat down. It was just so much more engaging to expound on the finer points of the illustrations on their cups, and the attitudes of Pasadena residents relative to those outside of it, and how there should be a law passed to forbid Greenday from releasing any more albums.

Finally, there was a pause in conversation as Connor waited for Bethany to come down from a giggle fit. She sighed, her smile fading slowly, and asked, “So are we just giving up now? He doesn’t want to be found, so we’re not going to find him?”

He shrugged. “Can’t say that was my plan exactly.”

“And your plan exactly was...?”

“What?” He widened his eyes. “So I was supposed to have one ready? Okay, hang on and I’ll come up with something real fast.”

Of course he had neither the intentions nor the capability of instantly forming an agenda, but Bethany knew to not take him seriously and accepted the following silence with nothing but a smirk to precede it. She stared into her latte for a moment, and when Connor realized that the liquid in the cup was swirling independently, he stared into it too. “You can stir things with your mind,” he said. “That is...so incredibly cool.”

She smiled modestly. “Keeps me from getting spoons dirty. How much time do you have?”

He automatically cast a glance at his watch, then grasped her actual meaning. “The rest of the summer,” he replied.

“You were going to spend the whole summer looking for Angel?”

“Well, no. I mean, I’ve only got the cash to last a week or two, but I expected something to change before it was gone. And if it didn’t, well, I could probably count on not finding anything after that point.”

Her expression was empathic. “Had a nice little mental picture of a reunion with the gang, right? Me too. I kept thinking like I was just going to walk into the hotel and he would be there, and Cordelia would be there, and she would run over and hug me and start yelling at me for losing touch...”

Connor’s throat constricted, fighting the responsibility that had just been thrown into his lap. The thought that he would have to be the one to break news like this had never occurred to him, and the shock of it seemed to still the words before they could come. “Cordelia,” he said quietly, concentrating on clear annunciation. “She died. Some time this past year.”

“Oh God.” Bethany’s hand over her mouth and the quivering reflections of light on her irises said all that needed to be said. “I thought she was just... _busy_...”

It was the grief that Connor had wanted for himself, the visceral reaction that he knew Cordelia’s death deserved but which he was no longer able to feel. It only made matters worse to have nothing in mind that he could conceive of saying to comfort Bethany. He didn’t even have details about the circumstances, or a place where the two of them could bring flowers. “I’m sorry,” he said, hating the phrase. “I didn’t know you knew her.”

A few tears dripped down Bethany’s cheeks, which oddly enough served to dissipate some of the tension. It at least gave her something to do, as she bent her head to wipe them away, and an excuse to break eye contact. “It’s alright,” she sniffled. “We weren’t exactly close, it’s just...she was nice to me, you know? She was out there helping people. And she was young.”

“It’s not fair,” he agreed. “I think that’s part of what this is all about, for me. People like her shouldn’t die young.”

“So you want to be a hero?” Her eyes were blazing with the vivid contrast of a woman in tears, but her voice was steady and the question was direct. 

“I don’t know,” Connor admitted. “I can’t answer any of these questions I have-- about Angel, myself, the Apocalypse That Isn’t-- not without being here and seeing it in person. I can’t leave yet.”

She flashed him a smile, a startling expression not only for its sudden appearance but for its veiled ferocity. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

“Let’s go in. Cross the barrier. See what we can see.”

Connor took a good long look at every part of the coffee shop surrounding them. He knew that nobody had been eavesdropping on them, but he couldn’t help it. What Bethany was proposing was exhilarating, but dangerous in more ways than he thought he could list. “There could still be stuff in there,” he started.

“Stuff we can’t handle?”

He thought about that. “Probably not. I mean, with my brains and your good looks...”

She snickered. “What do we even need superpowers for, right?”

“I’m convinced.”

“Here goes nothing.”

They were already relatively close to the barrier, but after leaving the Starbucks they took a short detour to hit a convenience store. They didn’t know how long they would be out there, and Connor insisted they stock up on energy bars and fill his Nalgene bottle before crossing into no man’s land. Bethany laughed when she saw how attentively he had packed the single bag he had brought for the trip. “Boy Scout, huh?”

“See, everyone thinks the Scouts are funny, but nobody turns down a drink of water when I’m the only one who brought any.”

Sudden concern crossed her face. “You think I should find somewhere to buy a bag? I only brought a suitcase, and it’s back at the motel...”

He shook his head. “I can carry enough water for both of us. And we might have a chance to do some looting later on. There have to be some resources in there, I just don’t want to have to fight anyone for them—-“ He suddenly realized that they had reached the counter and were having their conversation in front of a very nervous-looking cashier. “You know how intense these paintball tournaments can get,” Connor continued as he dug out his wallet. It wasn’t the best cover-up, but it got them out of the store without having the police called. 

They passed the door to the underground club on their way through the quiet part of town, and Connor hesitated, wondering if Lorne was still there. It was a pointless train of thought, though—- the empath demon was already part of the past, and there was no sound of music this time anyway. Nothing else about the area had changed, aside from the light of late morning. It was still as quiet as the grave and humbled underneath the shadow of the giant barrier, and this time it instilled a sense of reverential fear. Trespassing in the unknown land was no more or less than their intentions, but a wall like this one wouldn’t let them pretend that what they were doing was anything but trespassing. 

“We have to make sure nobody sees us,” Bethany stated as they approached the blockade, her voice quavering slightly.

“There’s nobody around to see us.”

“We have to make _sure_ ,” she insisted. “We’re breaking the law. Oh God, this is crazy, maybe we should just go.”

Connor raised an eyebrow, vexed. Why did she sound scared all of a sudden? “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want. But I swear, nobody’s around. I would hear them.” And if that failed him he would smell them, but he didn’t think girls were usually into hearing about olfactory peculiarities.

Bethany took a deep breath. “I do want to do it. I’m just being...it doesn’t even matter if I get in trouble with the law anymore. I keep forgetting.”

They had reached the wall, and Connor touched it with both hands, testing the material. “What do you mean?” he asked as he leaned into the plastic.

“Kind of a long story.”

“I’ve got all summer, remember?”

She made a sound that was half sigh and half chuckle, and leaned up against the wall next to him. “Okay, so, after I found out what Wolfram & Hart wanted out of me, I cut my ties to them and I thought I was done with it. But even after I left LA, I kept being approached by suits—- and sometimes people without suits—- and actually, a couple of demons, too. They never tried to hurt me physically, but they kept making me offers. Like, financial stuff, or scholarships, or jobs. A few times it was when I was getting kind of desperate, but I learned to research where they were coming from, and every single time, there was some connection to Wolfram & Hart.

“It freaked me out. They couldn’t touch me as long as I didn’t have any legal obligations to them, but I realized that if I ever got in trouble with the law, they were either going to be representing me, or they’d be on the other side. Once in a while my telekinesis would spaz on me and I’d break something, and I was so afraid of being sued for it that I would just leave the town. It’s been hard to put roots anywhere.” She looked up from the ground, meeting his eyes. “But now there is no Wolfram & Hart, so...let’s go wild, I guess.”

Connor had stopped exploring the barrier, completely drawn in by the glimpse into Bethany’s recent history. It was more than she had revealed about herself since he had met her, and he had an inkling that there were few who had heard even that much. “Don’t worry,” he said, putting a grave emphasis on each word. “We won’t take any risks we don’t have to, okay? And if things get bad, I won’t bail out on you. I swear.”

She rewarded him with a delicate smile and nodded. “Well, this isn’t any less crazy, but I’m feeling okay. Are we going to scale this thing?”

He turned his attention back to the wall and slid his fingers beneath one of its plastic panels. “I was thinking more like…yup. It’s bendy. Stand back.” He wedged himself between the first layer and the wooden one behind it, and with a few awkward and somewhat painful punches, he had a hole ripped through. He kicked out the edges to make it into a nice human-sized hole, and stepped away, pulling the flexible layer of plastic out to open the entrance for Bethany.

She ducked and stepped through without another word, and Connor tossed his backpack in and then followed, letting the panel fall back into place. He thought that the damage would be concealed when seen from the other side, but the deserted area around it probably meant that it didn’t matter either way.

Bethany was standing with her arms crossed, surveying the surroundings, when Connor straightened up and joined her. “Wow,” he said after a short silence. “This looks just like Los Angeles would look if it were totally abandoned.”

What fallout was visible from their standpoint was negotiable; it was the stillness that unnerved Connor. Somehow it seemed so much more obvious on this side of the barrier: there was nobody here. Aside from himself and a cute redhead and a few crows doing their tough-guy hops along the pavement, there was really, really nobody here. It was the first time LA had ever made him feel like his presence there was noticeable.

“Which way?” said Bethany.

He shrugged. “Straight ahead should bring us closer to ground zero. We won’t find much around the edges.” Privately he wondered how the state had chosen where to erect the fence. He couldn’t see any significant difference between the side of it he had just left and the one he was standing on now, at least for a few blocks in front of him. Maybe it was all just arbitrary, because nobody involved actually knew where the doom and demons were supposed to begin.

They had been walking in relative silence for about twenty minutes before they found either doom or demons, and then it was a little of each. Bethany spotted a derelict building, an apartment complex bearing wounds that were clearly the result of recent events: it wasn’t old enough to be abandoned, and no other structure around it had any damage to match its rent edges and scorched walls. “Let’s go in,” said Bethany.

After the obligatory discussion—- Connor wouldn’t call it an argument—- about whether there could be hidden enemies in there and whether the building’s structural integrity was weakened enough to threaten collapse, they entered the lobby and stood there blinking away the darkness and listening.

At first it seemed they were listening to more silence, but then there was a muffled groan, making them both snap their heads around to seek its source. Connor’s acute hearing found it first; or at least, led his vision to spot a twitching foot poking out from the hallway. Bethany was looking the other way, and he touched her shoulder to point it out to her.

As she whirled to face him, he was overcome by an indescribably odd sensation. It was as if a giant invisible hand had slammed into him, laying pressure all over his body but removing it quickly enough to spare him the brunt of the immense strength that he instinctively knew was there. The whole experience took less than a second, and by the time he had stumbled backwards and regained his balance, the only thing that registered about it was Bethany standing before him. “Sorry,” she said, reinforcing her sheepish tone with a dark blush. “I have—used to have—this thing about being touched. I’m mostly over it, but you kind of startled me.”

“I’ll remember that,” he said breathlessly. It was too bad, he thought, that she was embarrassed by the incident. That kind of power made him want to see her try some experiments. 

She fidgeted. “You saw something?”

“Oh, right. Over here.” He led her to the corridor. A figure lay in front of the elevator doors there, a scruffy man with a baleful glare. Although he was the owner of the foot that Connor had seen, the foot wasn’t one of a pair: there was no blood to explain it, but the right leg was completely missing from the hip down. 

Bethany emitted a little shriek when she beheld the grim sight, and Connor stepped unobtrusively between her and the cripple. “Let me handle this,” he murmured.

“What? No! We have to help him, get him out of here!”

“No we don’t.” Connor got down on one knee for a closer look. “We just need something wooden. He’s a vampire.”

With the deranged snarl of the trapped predator, the vampire attempted to lunge at Connor. Of course he succeeded only in rolling and flailing, and Connor struck with one hand and pushed him back away. From behind him he heard Bethany’s sharp intake of breath.

“What happened to your leg?” she asked the vampire in a near-whisper.

“What do you think happened, bitch?” he growled back at her. “It turned into ashes.”

Moving slowly out of respect for what he had just learned about Bethany’s phobia, Connor stood up and guided her away from the corridor with a light touch to her elbow. “Stay here,” he requested when the vampire was once again concealed from her vision, and then he left her side and found a wooden chair to break. 

The vampire had nothing else to say to him, having recognized immediately that it stood no chance of survival. It stayed in its human visage right up to the point that it exploded into ashes, and Connor spent the next few hours with that disdainful face painted on the insides of his eyelids every time he blinked.

“How did you know it was a vampire?” Bethany asked him a bit later on. They were walking through a low-income part of town, or what used to be part of town, anyway. The destruction here was still minimal and randomly spaced, but the stores and residential buildings on either side seemed hollow with abandon. Connor and Bethany had chosen to walk down the center of the road rather than use the sidewalks—- it was the only way to not feel closed in.

“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “I think it’s just part of my powers. Vampires can sense each other, and I have most of the vampire advantages, so...”

“So it’s kind of like you are a vampire. I get it.”

Connor frowned, surprised by his own consternation at the remark. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m alive.”

Her pace didn’t slow as she looked up to meet his eyes in the bright sunlight. “Well, obviously. But, I mean, if your mom was a vampire and your dad was a vampire, doesn’t that mean you’re at least part vampire?”

“No. It means I’m, uh... It means I’m a freak, but I’m human. See, vampires are human bodies, but they’re dead and reanimated. I’m alive and I have no demon, so I’m human. I couldn’t be anything else.”

“Oh.” She chewed her lip for a moment and looked straight ahead. “So, Mr. Human Freak Guy, you know your stuff, huh?”

He shrugged and nodded. “As far as vampires go. Holtz really ground it into me.” He saw her brow furrow slightly at the name, and added, “The guy who raised me in the demon dimension.”

There was a pause. Connor found himself sunken in thought again, more deeply than he really wanted to be. The ghost city around him offered no distraction, hardly seeming to change as they walked. It was difficult to get a sense of how big Los Angeles really was until trying to cross it on foot.

Bethany was, again, the first to speak. “Are you immortal?” she asked.

Connor reeled slightly. “God, no. I mean, I age. I grew up from conception like everyone else.”

“Still,” she persisted. “What if you just don’t know yet? You said you have most of the vampire advantages, so...”

“Immortality isn’t an advantage.” The words came out without any forethought, but they felt right. “Not when you have a soul. Your mind changes when you get turned into a vampire—they can handle living forever. We can’t.”

“Even you? Even Angel?”

“Those are two very different questions,” he informed her, but she limited her response to a sidelong look at him, and he was stuck trying to answer anyway. “There’s not enough vampire in me to handle it. I think I’d go crazy if I lived for a hundred years, let alone to infinity. I can’t even grasp it in concept.”

She held her silence, leaving him time to ponder the second part of her question. He was still feeling uncomfortable about her hypothesis regarding his mortality, though, and he took the chance to turn it around on her. “Would you want to be immortal?”

“Kind of,” she said quietly. “It would be nice to have enough time to do everything you really want to do. To make up for the mistakes you make when you don’t know any better. It seems like there’s never enough time.”

He considered this, wondering more about why Bethany would feel that way than whether he did. Before he had thought up anything to say, she spoke again, in a much less serious tone. “But that’s wishful thinking for you. In the real world I’d probably go crazy from it too.”

“It wouldn’t drive Angel crazy,” he said slowly. “Or it would have already, I think. But he doesn’t want it. For him it just means he has to watch everyone die while he goes on and on redeeming himself.”

“So living forever only works out when you’re evil. Doesn’t seem fair.”

Connor could only agree, though he refrained from making any cynical comments about how nothing was fair—he liked to think that Angel wouldn’t be cynical if he were here for this talk. The imagined presence of the vampire’s sad wisdom was reassuring, somehow, and Connor continued it out loud: “That’s got to be why he tried so hard to save everyone else. It gave him a chance to live through us.”

“Yeah.” Bethany’s voice sounded fond, but it was a while before she looked his way again. The ghost town around them didn’t seem to interest her either, nor the crows that kept landing and relocating on signs and rooftops, just the empty road laid out in front of them. “Angel was upset when I wouldn’t stay,” she said after a minute or two. “He said he could give me a safe place for as long as it took me to stabilize. Even kind of hinted that there was room for someone like me in his little business. Funny thing was, though, he never tried to change my mind. He just said he was there if I ever needed a friend, and he let me go.”

“Why didn’t you?” asked Connor. “Stay with him, I mean.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “I just needed to be the one taking care of myself for a while, I guess.”

“I can understand that.”

That seemed to be all the discussion she wanted on that topic, for she changed it swiftly. “So that Holtz guy was kind of like a father to you?”

“Kind of, but now that the sentiment is gone from that life, I’m mostly just vaguely mad at him.” Connor kicked a rock in front of him, wondering as it rolled away if it was a real rock or some stray debris. “Honestly, that’s part of why I don’t like thinking about the whole mess. Holtz was one of the only things that really mattered to me, and now I know he’s crazy and dead and incredibly wrong, and I can’t even bring myself to care. Makes me feel like a robot.”

“Okay,” she said, “But, I don’t know. Three fathers and only one of them was an asshole? Sounds to me like you got off easy.”

“That’s one way to think about it,” Connor mused. “Of course, Angel had his asshole years too.”

“Were you there for that?”

She asked the question in a sharper voice than he had heard from her yet, and he looked over at her to see that she was giving him a piercing stare, her arms crossed against her chest. “No,” he replied.

“Then don’t complain about it. His past is his own business. People change.”

A few tentative apologies later they were walking in silence again. Connor wasn’t sure how to ease the friction: he _was_ sorry, but he was sorry that he had accidentally upset her, not that he thought he had done anything wrong. Clearly she could identify the distinction, and though she told him not to worry about it, further attempts at conversation slid off of her.

Evidence of the battle seemed to be in a holding pattern for a long ways; now and then they would see a building that was smashed beyond repair, but those were few and far between. Most streets were empty of cars. Once they crossed an intersection that was nothing but cars, blocking it off in every direction, apparently the site of a large number of residents giving up on that method of escape when it proved too hectic. Here and there, power lines were ripped down, and all over the place there were items lying in the road that just didn’t belong there: a battleaxe, a shining metal mask, a briefcase full of legal documentation. 

Fortunately, they saw no bodies at all. Even at the automotive pile-up, each car held no passengers, and though there were a few spots on the pavement that looked and smelled suspiciously like blood, their origin was left uncertain. Connor had little doubt that these were the killing grounds, but the government’s work here had made a difference and he was grateful for it.

At first, there was a temptation to keep wandering off to the side to inspect a smashed-in wall or pick up a medieval weapon, but as those sights became more commonplace, both Connor and Bethany became more driven. They walked straight ahead whenever they could, and when their path was blocked or terminated in a dead end, Connor would seek another route and point it out for Bethany. Once, she telekinetically lifted a bulky beam away from the alley he had selected, but for the most part she seemed to prefer to leave things as they were, picking her way around rubble and broken footing just as he was.

“Connor,” she said suddenly, startling him. Neither of them had spoken for at least an hour. He turned to her, and she continued humbly, “I’m really tired.”

Connor’s breath caught in his throat. “I didn’t realize—- let’s rest, yeah, sit down. Have some water. I’m so sorry, we’ve been walking so long and I just didn’t think—- I’m sorry.”

She half-smiled and pointed to the closest intact building. “Office lobby,” she said. “I bet there’s a couch in there.”

There was, and they both took one end of it and passed the Nalgene bottle back and forth over Connor’s backpack, which he had placed between them. Connor hardly felt any fatigue, but he was just as hungry as Bethany, and by mutual agreement they finished off most of their provisions.

“I didn’t mean to get all moody on you,” said Bethany after finishing her last energy bar. “I’ve just been thinking about...about eternity, I guess. Living forever. It must be so lonely.”

“Yeah,” Connor agreed cautiously, not quite ready to test the waters of this kind of talk with her again.

“Of course, most people seem to be pretty lonely anyway. You know the divorce rate is up to...um...a lot?”

He nodded. “Not sure if having infinite time to work on things would make that better or worse.” 

She laid an arm over the back of the couch and rested her head on it, facing him. “Did your parents get divorced?”

“No, they’re still together.” He paused. “Or, they split up about a hundred years before Darla staked herself to give birth and Angel took me home. Sorry, any question you ask me about myself, I’m probably going to have two answers.”

Bethany’s eyes had started to widen near the middle of that comment, and now they looked as big as pancakes. “No shit,” she said. “Darla? Her name was Darla?”

“Yeah.” He frowned. “Why?”

She emitted a short laugh of disbelief. “He wouldn’t tell me who she was.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I guess it’s, well, kind of personal.” She laughed again, then stood up and stretched, locking her hands above her head. “Want to get going?”

He sighed and vacated his end of the couch. “You’re really not going to say any more about this, are you?”

“Maybe someday,” she allowed as they headed back outside.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re kind of a mysterious lady?”

“Says the guy who was born to two vampires and raised in a demon dimension.”

He raised up his arms in a theatrical gesture, said, “Touche,” and let the subject fall away to wherever all the others had gone. Their interaction felt a little easier after that point, though, and they started swapping remarks about what they were seeing around themselves.

It was getting worse, Connor noted, and had been since they left the outskirts of the city. As they got deeper into LA and found themselves in the districts that had until recently been the busiest, richest, and most famous, there were larger holes in everything and larger chunks of things in the way. There was even a distasteful smell in the air—sulfur, or something like that. They were definitely getting close to the center of the action, whatever that was.

The most ominous element of the landscape, though, was in the empty spaces between skyscrapers that Connor slowly began to realize were abnormal. He had a sudden flashback to the skyline as he had seen it from the bus into Pasadena, and winced at the thought of approaching the heart of that ruination. Again he was the first to notice, but he didn’t need to explain it to Bethany. As soon as her vision could make sense of the wide expanse of missing buildings, her mind did too, and Connor saw her flinch and shudder before she regained her steady gait.

Before long, there was one more oddity in front of them that Connor had to analyze. It was down on the ground, a motionless streamlined shape somewhere in front of him, but the improbable enormity of it made it difficult for him to gauge its distance. After a few minutes he got impatient and asked Bethany, “Do you see that?”

She didn’t, at first, but then she reached out a hand and swept it along the outline of the shape. “You mean that thing? I thought it was part of the ground...but it’s not, is it? It’s a…I don’t know.”

They kept approaching, the shape getting bigger and crisper in Connor’s view until finally the connection between his eyes and brain kicked in and he stopped in his tracks. “Bethany.”

She stopped too, raising an eyebrow at him.

“You know what that is?” He took a deep breath. “That’s a...that’s a dead dragon.”

***

Even in death, the dragon was among the most intimidating creatures that Connor had ever seen. It took time for him and Bethany to circle it, all the more so because every inch of its body was alien and fascinating to human eyes. Connor counted the curving talons on each of its feet, tried to see over its slumped shoulders and couldn’t, and tentatively reached out to touch the leathery membranes of its wings. He had no inkling of the origin of such a beast, whether evolution or magic was primarily responsible for its design, but the end result was clearly the kind of power that this world had never known.

And nevertheless, it had been killed. As Connor made his way around its sinuous form, he noted the deep slashes scored into its skin at various places, and its own retaliation had been evident in the scorch marks all over the city, but when he reached its head, the ultimate cause of death was obvious. The dragon had fallen so that its neck was stretched out with its throat bared, and in the narrow gap between the armor of its jaws and underside, a sword was buried to the hilt.

Unable to curb the impulse that the sight of it gave him, Connor grabbed the sword and pulled, meeting with enough resistance to need his enhanced strength but not enough to stop him. The blade was covered in some dried substance that looked more black than red, and it gave him an odd feeling of sobriety that checked the joke about Excalibur he had been about to make. Still, he was holding the sword that had killed the dragon, and nobody could tell him that that wasn’t badass. He might have to take it home as a souvenir. Maybe give it back to Angel someday...no, it was better to not start thinking like that again. And why was he feeling so certain that Angel was the one who did this, anyway?

Still holding the sword, he stepped back and looked around for Bethany, so he could show it to her. She wasn’t visible-- must have been on the other side of the dragon. He was about to head over there when a soft creaking sound brought his attention back to where he had just been standing.

As he watched, bewildered, the dragon’s head rolled upright and faced him. Both of its eyes snapped open, revealing huge black pupils swimming under a milky haze.

Connor’s whole body went cold. _I know this,_ he told himself. _I know how to fight. Oh God, it’s not even decayed, it doesn’t smell, of course it was alive, I am such a-- no, I can do this, dammit!_ He gripped the sword and swung into a defensive stance. “BETHANY!” he yelled. _“RUN!”_

His mind was so divided between listening for her response and preparing for the dragon’s attack that both of them managed to take him by surprise. The dragon had stopped moving; its eyes, he saw, were closed once again. He kept his own locked on its form, unwilling to come out of his stance, and the seconds ticked by until he finally identified one solitary sound in the weighted stillness: Bethany’s laughter.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped as he whirled to find her, behind and to his left. “It’s just-- the look on your face!” The look on his face was, apparently, so funny that she was almost doubled over with mirth. “I couldn’t resist. Bad joke, I’m sorry, but...hahahaha!”

Connor took one last untrusting glance at the dragon, then gradually let his sword arm lower. “ _You_ did that? Are you kidding me?” Then full realization hit him: it was dead, they were safe, he didn’t have to fight. The relief that hit him was a powerful, physical sensation, and he drooped under it, using his free hand to mop a forehead that was suddenly drenched in sweat. “I should thank you. This whole trip would have been so boring if I didn’t fear for my life at least once.”

She stopped laughing, actually appearing to be a little dismayed.

“That was a joke,” he clarified. “Abandoned war zones, dead dragons, sadistic telekinetic pranksters...not what I put in the ‘boring’ files.”

“Still,” she said, coming a little closer to him. “I am sorry. I’m not usually sadistic. Um, you okay? You need a change of pants or anything?”

“My pants are fine, thanks.” He pointed at the dragon with his sword. “I think I’m done with this guy, though. Let’s hit the road.”

She tilted her head, peering at the weapon. “You’re going to keep that?”

“Sure, why not?”

“It’s all dirty.”

He chuckled. “It’ll clean up.”

They set off again, although both of them kept looking over their shoulders at the massive, dust-colored mound of the dragon. Crows were conspicuously absent from that entire area, and the fact that the creature hadn’t decayed popped into Connor’s head again, but he had no explanation for that and had to dismiss it. The thing wasn’t from this world; rules were just different.

He turned his gaze back in front of him once to see Bethany’s turned on him. “You were going to fight it,” she stated, almost shyly.

That made him smile, and he put on a pretentious accent. “Madam, I was going to kill it.”

“Why’d you tell me to run?”

He hadn’t really thought about that, and he suddenly had the feeling that this was a girl who wouldn’t like the implication that she shouldn’t fight alongside him. She had a right to it, too-- he had little doubt that if the two of them ever faced off, his strength would be no match for her. “I just had this thought in my head,” he said slowly, “that whatever happened there was a family affair. If Angel hadn’t finished it off, it was kind of my business.”

“Then it’s lucky for us that he did so it wasn’t.” She smiled at him, a beautiful sight. “But it’s cool you were going to fight it.”

The sun was going down soon, Connor saw. They had a little time, and he felt they could manage in the dark if they had to, but he started keeping an eye out for possible shelters. Nothing seemed very promising. The site of the dragon’s death must have been the hub of the most vicious parts of the battle, for the buildings and pavement in this area were proportionately more decimated. 

Finally they crossed a street that looked like it had been mostly spared, and they agreed to try their luck taking a walk down that way. It wasn’t long before something about his current surroundings began to niggle at him, and then Bethany echoed his thoughts in an uncertain voice: “This looks familiar...”

“We’re on Hyperion Avenue,” Connor realized out loud. “We’re headed toward the hotel.”

Bethany’s anticipation was evident in the extra spring in her step. Connor quickened his pace to keep up with her, though he left a wide berth to accommodate the sword, having no way to carry it other than openly in his hand. This was a serendipitous turn of events, for sure. He had guessed that they were in that section of town, but the proximity to Angel’s former base of operations came as an almost complete surprise. 

He won an unspoken competition between them to see the building first, but Bethany broke into a run when she did, and thus beat him to the gate. “It’s not smooshed!” she told him excitedly. “It looks just like it did when I left! Except they fixed all the windows. Let’s go!”

“How do we get past-- oh.” He had no sooner started the question than Bethany had peered through the iron bars and telekinetically picked the lock on the other side. She swung the gate in with her hands and walked into the courtyard without a backwards glance, and Connor followed closely, wondering if she could repeat the same trick on the hotel’s actual doors.

She couldn’t-- she said she needed a clear view of the objects she was moving-- but Connor decided that leaving some minimal damage wouldn’t be a big deal, and he found it fairly easy to force the lock. The two of them entered in a reverent hush, but in a few seconds Connor snapped out of his. They didn’t have much daylight left to them, and he wanted to use it to find some candles and flashlights.

They were in a storage closet, the first one he checked, and it seemed like such an obvious place to look that he couldn’t tell if it was tied into an old memory or if he had just made a lucky guess. As he laid out the candles to light up the lobby, Bethany wandered around peering at everything and murmuring little sounds of surprise or recognition. Connor finished lighting the single gas lantern he had found before he joined her. 

She turned from the courtyard window to face him, hauntingly illuminated in the waning light but wearing a blissful smile that increased her beauty tenfold, and said, “Do you know where they kept the food?”

He never could explain why that made him laugh, but they did find some food. It had been at least a year since anyone had entered the hotel, he judged, so they had to be careful about what they chose to eat, but he also got a chance to show off some more of his Boy Scout credentials by rigging up a cookstove on the front desk, using some pans and candles.

“Why do you think he had all this canned stuff?” Bethany asked as she finished off her plate of beans and mixed vegetables, her legs tucked up under her on the lobby’s couch. “I thought vampires didn’t eat human food.”

“Oh, Angel wasn’t the only one who lived here. Fred and Gunn had a room upstairs, Lorne had one...heck, I was a resident here myself during the short window of time that nobody thought I was waiting for a chance to off my father.”

His casual reference to patricide didn’t even give her pause. “Not Cordelia?” she asked.

He considered. “I don’t think so. Wait, maybe sometimes? My memories of her are a little fragmented. She was gone for a while, and then she had amnesia, and later on she was under a mystical influence. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t even herself, really, by the time we slept together--“

Bethany had just taken a sip of water, and she interrupted him with a classic choking sputter. “You did _what_ together?”

“Hey, this is the old hell-baked twisted me, remember? If Angel’s asshole past is his own business, so is mine.”

“Okay, okay. I was just surprised.” She looked down at her empty plate. “I get that you were different in that life, but you seem so...”

“So...?” he prompted her.

“Wholesome.” There was only a slight pause before they both started chuckling. “And speaking of which,” she continued, “is there anything in that cupboard for dessert?”

“I’ll go check.” He went back to the cupboard with a flashlight and peered into its depths until he spotted something that looked like chocolate bars. He reached in to move a few cans, and then the flashlight beam landed on a label that caught him completely off guard. He pulled out the container and stood there staring at it.

“Connor?” Bethany inquired from the couch. “What is that?”

He shook his head to clear it and finally looked up. “It’s baby formula.”

“Why...oh.” She got to her feet and drifted over to his side. “It’s still here even after the reality shift?”

“I guess it slipped through the cracks.” He didn’t really understand how that could happen, but he didn’t really understand magic in the first place, so that was a given. It was uncomfortable to think that physical traces of his former presence could be left here, but since reality didn’t seem to be coming apart at the seams, he had to just accept it and trust the experts.

He kept the flashlight trained on the can, trying to find words to express the way it made him feel. “I was here,” he said. “And, I mean, it was Connor Angel, not Connor Reilly, but...I was a baby, I wouldn’t remember it anyway. It’s real. It really happened.”

“And Angel remembers it,” said Bethany. She tilted her head, regarding him. “This must be so weird for you. I have memories here, but you-- you were a part of this."

“Yeah. I was...” He looked up from the can, and for a second their eyes met over the narrow shaft of light. “Loved. I feel loved.”

Bethany’s responding smile was tinged with sadness. “Boy, you’re lucky you’re not standing here with the old me. I think I probably would have made some noise about lame that sounds.” The baby formula pulled itself out of his hand and placed itself back on the shelf as she spoke. “But it’s not lame, is it? It’s just what it is. Being loved.”

Connor felt himself flush, though it was thankfully too dark for her to see it. For a moment he wondered how he had gotten here, talking about love with a telekinetic in an abandoned hotel, but the question was answered by the can of baby formula on the shelf and he let it go at that. “Let’s go check out some rooms,” he suggested.

He led the way with the gas lantern, she followed with a flashlight, and a few candy bars and unlit candles tagged along in the air behind her. Connor’s night vision was adequate in almost any circumstance, but even so, the corridor upstairs was downright creepy. He moved hastily to get into a room, even though he knew it wasn’t going to offer him the reassuring familiarity of flipping the lights on with a switch.

Setting down the lantern on a table and closing the door behind them was still an improvement to the atmosphere. “Here it is,” he said to Bethany. “This was my room.”

She stood in the center, did a 360 turn, and announced with a grin, “Mine too.” 

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Hey, you’ve got the better claim on it, but yeah, I’m sure. Although, wait! I was here first, so maybe I’ve got the better claim.”

He laughed. “Rock-paper-scissors?”

There was nothing left in the room that Connor remembered as being specifically his, but it was fully furnished and squared away, awaiting some future guest that the former residents had probably thought they would never have. Bethany found sheets and blankets in the closet, and they made up the bed together just because it seemed like the thing to do. They were human, Connor reasoned, and since the beginning of time, humans had done what they could to chase away the darkness.

Deep into the night, the lantern’s light faded but still flickered valiantly on, and Connor and Bethany had paid no attention to it for hours. They shared thoughts, joined lips and opened to receive tongues, settled against each other in silence with his arms looped around her, talked some more, kissed some more.

“This is nice,” Bethany confided at one point, still close enough to him that her lips brushed his cheek as she spoke. “I’ve never really...well, most guys just want to see how fast they can get the clothes to come off.”

“Most guys are idiots,” Connor assured her, punctuating the sentence with a kiss to her nose. “But I’m the rare exception. Sharp as a tack, really.” He kissed her cheek. “I’m also devilishly handsome and amazingly well-adjusted.” He kissed her other cheek. “Oh, and let’s not forget the supernatural strength. Not exactly a dragon slayer, but it’s not for lack of trying.”

Bethany giggled and nuzzled his neck, a gesture that he would recall much later with perfect clarity. “And you’re wholesome,” she said.

“Goes without saying.” He stroked his hand down her hair. “Hey, finish that story you were telling me.”

She sat up a little straighter, thinking, and then smiled. “Oh. Okay, so he pulls the rebar out of his chest, and I’m already a little hysterical, you know? All I can think is that this is some kind of divine intervention, like a messenger from God took a wrong turn and met up with the crazy loose cannon girl instead of the virtuous maiden. And then he says his name is--“ She broke off there and started laughing, a genuinely amused sound despite her evident embarrassment. “He says, he says--“

Her mirth was contagious, and he grinned as he helped her finish the story. “You thought he was a real angel.”

“I sort of did! I mean, just my luck, right? The heavens part and there stands the champion in all his glory, and wham, I run him through with a rebar. If he hadn’t given me his card before I ran off, I probably would have convinced myself that it had all been a hallucination.”

“Well, I’m glad you gave him a chance.”

“Believe me, so am I.” She leaned into him, lending him a surge of gratitude that she had overtaken her reluctance to be touched. Without meeting his eyes she queried, “Did you ever meet Lilah Morgan? Wolfram  & Hart lawyer?” 

He thought about it, taking her change of topic in stride. “Yes,” he said, unable to hide his cringe when he remembered what had happened to the woman in question. “She died. It was a bad time.”

“Oh.” Bethany sounded impassive. Why she was curious about Lilah, Connor couldn’t guess, but at least it wasn’t another Cordelia situation. 

He hugged her anyway, feeling that offering comfort was just the natural thing to do when death came up, and she squeezed him back and tilted her face up to his, seeking another kiss. He obliged, making it one to remember, and then there was a long moment of silence. When she broke it, her voice was soft and guilty. “I tried to seduce Angel.”

“Whoa.” A confession like that was too much of a surprise for him to react any other way, but he felt her body stiffen against him and he automatically did what he could to relax her, rubbing her back and taking on a reassuring tone. “I’m guessing that didn’t work out too well?”

“Heh. No. I...I had some issues back then. Thought it was kind of my duty to reward him for saving me. Thought that if I was the one who got into his bed, he’d get what he wanted from me without a fuss and I could maybe trust him to not take anything else.”

“But that wasn’t really want he wanted from you, was it?”

“Nope.” She sighed heavily. “He just wanted to help. I couldn’t believe that. I _wouldn’t_ believe that. Everyone I knew was trying to take advantage of me in one way or another. God, I got so tired of being used.” 

He hesitated, not sure if he was meant to comment on these thoughts or if it was enough to just hear them without judging. Sympathy wasn’t something he had to fake for this, though. “Well, I believe that,” he said. “But just for the record, I can’t imagine you ever letting anyone use you. Not the girl I see now.”

“Thank you,” she murmured. “I’ve been working pretty hard at being this girl.”

Something clicked as Connor mentally reviewed Bethany’s newly revealed history with Angel, and he failed to stop himself from saying it out loud. “That’s when you heard about Darla, isn’t it? He was trying to discourage you and he told you there was already a woman in his life.”

“Not exactly,” she replied easily. “He was talking in his sleep. Having, you know, one of those kinds of dreams...”

“Say no more,” Connor interjected. “I beg you.”

She snickered, pulling his hand into her lap and idly tracing its lines with her fingertip. “Still, it’s pretty crazy, isn’t it? Angel dreams about Darla while I’m there, and then a year and change later, they’re your parents. You think she was like, his soulmate or something?”

Connor winced. “I sure hope not. She was evil. Mostly.” He thought briefly of Angel’s feelings for Cordelia, but chose not to bring them up. Even from his admittedly skewed perspective, something hadn’t felt quite right about the two of them.

He left the room not long afterwards, nobly forgoing the game of rock-paper-scissors and letting her keep it. She told him to take the lantern, so he lit the candles beside her bed before he left, thinking she wouldn’t want to be left in complete darkness. The last kiss that they exchanged was different than the ones that had preceded it: almost bashful, as if they were both noticing for the first time that they had crossed into new territory with each other.

Connor didn’t tell Bethany which room he was headed for, and he didn’t know what had made him decide to sleep in Angel’s room. It felt a little weird, sure, but there hadn’t been a part of the last two days that hadn’t been weird, and anyway he must have had a crib in there at some point, so it was a little like it was his room too.

He had to force the lock again, which caused a loud bang. “I’m okay,” he called out, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

A tinkling laugh drifted down the hall in reply, and he walked into Angel’s suite and looked around. It had collected some dust, but was otherwise fastidiously clean and organized, and most of Angel’s personal possessions seemed to have stayed. Connor wondered why he would move somewhere without packing up his life. Perhaps he didn’t want his lodgings at Wolfram  & Hart to be personalized.

It was too dark to do much snooping even if snooping had been his primary intention, so he sat down on the bed to think and woke up in the same place, feeling as disoriented as he’d ever been. Aside from not knowing where he was, he wasn’t even sure he had fallen asleep: the heavy drapes kept the room in uniform darkness. Both questions were answered when he stumbled to the window and pushed the drapes aside, blinking into the morning sun, and he wondered crossly why Angel had arranged the room to keep out all the light. A few seconds later he came back to his senses and had a good laugh at himself.

His watch told him that he hadn’t slept in too long, but he didn’t linger in Angel’s suite. Everything he needed was in his backpack, and it felt better to leave the place undisturbed. 

When he got downstairs he found Bethany already up and waiting, dressed in clean clothes that he knew she hadn’t brought with her. “I found them in another room,” she said with a shrug. “I guess they were Cordelia’s.”

“Or Fred’s.”

She looked down at the powder-blue blouse she was wearing. “Interesting guy, then.”

He smiled. “Fred was a girl. Sleep okay?”

It only took a few minutes of chatting to plan their next step: both were hungry and neither wanted to raid the hotel’s stash again, and Bethany suggested they “eat out,” trying their luck with the city’s stores. Connor was loath to leave the hotel without at least a little bit of daylight exploration, though, and that led to a few more discoveries. 

One was the weapons cabinet, which was locked securely and still contained an impressive collection. Looking at it gave Connor an idea, and he poked around in nearby cabinets until he found a sheath for his souvenir. He also found some supplies to clean the dragon blood off the blade, and sat down with it immediately, refusing to leave it dirty any longer.

While he was thus occupied, Bethany found some mail that had been dropped through a slot and never opened, and she brought it all over to Connor and sat down on the floor with him. “Here’s another moral quandary,” she said. “Do we assume he’ll get back here someday and read this, or do we take the chance that reading it ourselves means we might be able to learn something that would help him?”

Connor shifted the sword on his knee and peered at the small stack of postal items. There were several women’s magazines, all addressed to Cordelia Chase, and most of the rest of it looked official and outdated, bearing the names Charles Gunn or Winifred Burkle. The only one that actually looked like a letter was also the only one with Angel’s name on it, and Connor’s hand automatically reached for it, then stopped and hovered there uncertainly. “It’s got to be around a year old now,” he said. “Whoever sent it”-- he checked the return address—- “this Robin Wood, he-slash-she has either gotten in touch with him by now, or whatever he-slash-she had to say isn’t relevant anymore.”

Bethany nodded. “So, is that an ‘open it’ or a ‘don’t open it’?”

“Let’s be realistic here. Our actual choices are ‘open it’ or ‘leave it in my backpack for a few hours until the curiosity kills us, and then open it’.”

“How very fatalistic of you,” said Bethany, seating herself next to him so they could both see the letter. “I’m opening it.”

The letter was typed, one terse paragraph over a list of contact information and a signature in pen: _The Sunnydale team has become divided in several matters, yourself included. I am a friend of Faith and she assures me that you can still be trusted, so I hope to begin a correspondence with you and keep our purposes aligned to some degree. Given our current drought of information, this is the only address of yours that we could find. If you receive this letter, please contact us as soon as possible._

“Any idea?” asked Bethany after they had finished reading.

Connor shook his head. “Sounds like a missed opportunity. Too bad.” He picked up the sword again and got back to work on it, and Bethany frowned and folded up the letter to put in her pocket.

Walking out of the ruined city felt a lot different than walking into it. What had been ominous became standard, and they spent a lot more time laughing and horsing around and just generally being inane. Connor turned a car over just to show that he could, and Bethany flipped it back upright with a smirk, and for a moment they came dangerously close to making a game out of tossing cars.

Breakfast at the nearest grocery store was no less chaotic, as Bethany got so excited by all the food that she started pulling it all off the shelves telekinetically, letting various containers float around her head while she made her selections. The potential food fight was cancelled on account of the terrible smell in the produce and meat departments, but they left the place with armloads of groceries and had a picnic on top of an abandoned semi. “I think I can check a few off my list of things I’ve always wanted to do,” said Bethany cheerfully. 

For long stretches of the walk they held hands, letting go and coming back together as the terrain allowed, needing no discussion about it. Deep conversations from the day before were periodically revived, but Connor soon noticed how exhausting that could get, and the walk was long enough to accommodate any number of topics. 

The hottest part of the day featured the most frivolous talk. “Is it alive?” Connor asked as he squinted against the reflection of the sun on an office window, wishing for sunglasses.

“Nope,” Bethany replied. “Thirteen.”

“Did it used to be alive?”

She grinned. “Yes. Good one! Twelve.”

“Okay, does it still move even though it’s dead?”

“You’re too good at this. Yes. Eleven.”

Connor cleared his throat with premature triumph. “Is it the dragon?”

“No. Ten.”

“What?” He faked a glare. “It has to be the dragon. You changed the answer in the middle so I wouldn’t get it.”

“I would never!”

“Well, if something croaked and doesn’t stay still, experience tells me that you have something to do with it. Seriously, who else do you think I know who makes inanimate objects attack me?”

She punched his arm playfully. “Yes-or-no questions only. And you only have ten of them left.”

Connor lost his train of thought quickly, which was not unusual for him when he was stuck on a missing part of a puzzle. “I used to play this game in the car with my sisters,” he said. “Only instead of Twenty Questions we called it Infinity Questions, and kept guessing until someone got the answer.”

“Yeah? I feel like I’ve been playing Infinity Questions for days. Except without the answer at the end.”

Two crows launched themselves from the middle of the road as Connor and Bethany approached them, and his eyes followed them up to the sky and behind a tall building. “We got a few answers, didn’t we?” he replied.

She shrugged. “Sure. But mostly the kind that makes more questions. You remember everything Lorne said about heroes?”

“Sure.”

“Heroes did this.” She waved a hand in a wide arc, indicating the vast expanse of broken, empty landscape surrounding them. “I know they were fighting evil, but one way or another, the second-biggest city in America got trashed. People died. Because the heroes decided this was when they were going to fight, and where, and how. And what did we get out of it? Questions.”

Connor took a deep breath, shaken. His hand dropped to the hilt of the sword at his hip, and he gave it a squeeze. “They must have known something,” he offered. “There must have been some reason that things would have been even worse if they didn’t end it this way.”

“I hope so,” said Bethany sadly. “I believe so, really. I just wish I had some proof to hold onto, even just a word from someone who knew the truth. I wish it wasn’t just me trusting a guy who was good to me a few years ago.”

“I see what you mean,” said Connor, wishing he didn’t. He felt like there had to be something he could say to make her believe that everything was for the better, but instead he found himself immersed in her doubts. He too was operating on nothing but trust. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured Angel as he had last seen him, radiating energy and desperation and fully prepared for his final sacrifice. He had just drained the blood of an enemy. He was...

“Oh.” Connor opened his eyes and looked at Bethany. “It’s Angel, isn’t it? Dead but still moving.”

She looked bemused, then laughed. “Yeah. Honestly I thought you would guess that a lot faster.”

“I never really thought of him as dead.”

“Hm. I like that.”

They walked on. Leaving the heart of the city meant that the increase in destruction that they had seen on their way in happened in reverse, and it was a bit of a relief to look around and see less and less damage. Eventually there was none in view. The route they had chosen was slightly different than the one from the day before, but there were still recognizable landmarks telling them how close they were to the borders.

Connor kept his eyes on the sun, feeling its progress across the sky as a kind of oppression. He had no fear of being trapped inside Los Angeles-- just the opposite. Once the day was over, the journey was over too, and he would have no further reason to be trespassing on battlegrounds and making discoveries with Bethany. He took a glance at her, then straight ahead, and sighed. The barrier was within sight again. It was time to have the talk.

“Where are you going to go?” he said quietly.

She folded her arms against her chest and looked straight ahead. “I haven’t really decided. I was staying with some friends in Oregon before this. I might go back there.”

“Well, it’s just...” He caught himself before it turned into an unintelligible mumble. After everything that they had shared about themselves, why was _this_ hard to talk about? “I mean, if you’re not already in college, you could maybe...Stanford’s a good school...”

The look she gave him then was intensely skeptical, but he thought there might be a little bit of a smile behind it. “You want me to apply to your college?”

“No! I mean, yes, if you want to. Obviously. But if it wasn’t right for you there are other ones nearby. And if you don’t want to go to college at all, it’s still a nice town. I mean, there’s, there’s houses, and roads, and stores, and, wow, all kinds of stuff, it’s amazing.”

“I can’t afford my own place.”

They hadn’t stopped walking during the conversation, and now they had reached the inevitable end, the barrier. Both of them halted a few yards away from it and faced each other, Bethany holding her gaze a little more downcast than Connor’s. Her statement about her financial matters had been no more than the bitter truth, he realized.

“I could help you,” he said. “My family has money. I could get you set up.”

“Connor, we’ve known each other for two days.” She lifted her eyes, but there was a resigned note of finality in her voice.

“Lorne said we should stick together.”

“You always do what karaoke demons tell you to?”

“Only the empathic ones.” He took a step closer to her and touched her shoulder. “Please, Bethany. Don’t just walk out of my life.”

She didn’t return the gesture, but she didn’t move away from it, either. “I think...I think there’s something I’m supposed to be doing with myself. With my powers. I have to find another Angel, or...can I have that letter from Robin Wood?”

He blinked in surprise, but fished the letter out of his backpack and handed it to her. “You’re going to find these people?”

She nodded. “Hey, if anyone knows what to do with a telekinetic, sounds like it might be them.”  
It made sense, he had to admit. Beyond money, he had little to offer her, and if she was looking for a purpose, he had no right to try to stop her from finding it. Still, it didn’t mean he couldn’t follow her example. “If you get somewhere with this, maybe I should--“

“Maybe you should give me your number.” She smiled. “Maybe we should keep in touch. Maybe we should spend a couple days finishing off our respective California vacations.”

Gradually Connor began to feel his own face reflecting her smile. “You’re a smart lady,” he said. He looked up and over at the barrier. “Can’t really say I relish the thought of returning to the real world.”

The sentence was barely out of his mouth when she launched herself at him and threw her arms around him. Connor needed no help from his brain to tell him how to respond; his body knew exactly where his arms should move to encircle her, how his hand should cradle her head as she tilted it back to look up at him, how his mouth should be pressed against hers and his heartbeat indistinguishable from hers. She smelled like a waterfall in a deep forest, and suddenly he knew beyond a shadow of doubt that there would be a time to tell her that, and it wasn’t today.

“Okay,” he said breathlessly as they separated. “I’m ready.”


End file.
